Three Goals for Better Time Management

Do you ever have the feeling that there aren't sufficient hours in the day? Time management is something that can make a huge difference to what you can achieve during the working day. The following are a series of tips to help you and your team manage time successfully.

Organization and goal setting

• Decide your personal life/career objectives.
• Specify the objectives in specific terms. Make them measurable: have specific aims and deadlines.
• Break your aims down into assessable objectives.
• Review your aims at regular intervals. Don't just write them down and forget them.
• Keep your written aims at hand always.
• Focus on the efforts that contribute to your self improvement.
• Review your personal mission, aims and objectives at regular intervals - and assess how much you achieved.

Planning

• Plan your time. Don't let it control you.
• Assess your work carefully and allocate priorities.
• Allocate priorities in order: A's, B's, C's and D's.
  • A's are important and urgent.
  • B's are important but not urgent.
  • C's can be dealt with outside of you key business/sales time.
  • D's are unimportant, and can be discarded immediately.
• Make appointments with yourself in your diary for personal time to evaluate your progress and plan time for the coming days and weeks.
• Stick to your day as you have planned it. Make a plan and stick to it.
• To help with planning, always ask the questions: what, who, why, where, when and how?

Delegation

• Concentrate on those "tasks" whose success depends on you.
• Delegate wherever possible. Make use of administrative, technical or specialist staff.
• When delegating, do not abdicate tasks. If it is your "task" it is your final responsibility.
• Agree a timeline for tasks which are being delegated, then let the other person get on with them.
• Make sure the delegation instruction has been fully understood, and leave room for questions